Virtualization Daily

This was a really long running poll, but an interesting one. The question was “What do you see as the biggest barrier to adoption for virtual appliances?” Here are the results.

• Performance concerns 24% - This isn’t too surprising to me, I seem to constantly hear about how virtualization doesn’t perform well enough for production use. Whether that’s true or not is another question, but it is a common concern.
• Concerns about trusting the appliance builder 19% - To me this is a really important one. Your basically downloading a virtual computer and plugging it into your network. The risk with that is huge and it’s extremely important that you trust the appliance builder.
• Management tool support 13% - Clearly coming from an enterprise perspective virtual appliances need to fit cleanly into the management infrastructure, but I’m a little surprised to see this beating out things like security concerns.
• Limited customization options 13% - When we first started working on building virtual appliances we expected this to be a huge issue for users. It turns out to be less of a problem than we originally expected, so again surprised it beat out security.
• Security concerns 11% - This one’s surprising, I would have expected it to be near the top as it’s such a common criticism of virtual appliances.
• Concerns about getting support 11% - Not much to say about this other than it matches roughly what I’m seeing in the real world.
• Too few appliances available 9% - Now this is really interesting, maybe I should have phrased it “too few quality appliances available”. Despite the numbers that VMWare throws around there really aren’t that many quality virtual appliances available.

Overall some interesting results, now it’s time to finally put this one to rest and think up a new poll.